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    • Fall | 2012 Reading
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JOSEPH FASANO

Vigil

I remember the years of our slumber.  Someone
            had wounded you, and you could not say.

A young man hung above you, in briar.
            Years happened.  Fire.  The wind blew the walls

away.  I drifted
            in a spruce wood, bluebells matting

the acres.  Go to Spain, you
            said.  I went to Spain.  The sea

was white where I traveled.  Milk-deep.  Brimming
            with opal.  I smelled the darkening

pines of a mooring, the ripening
            cliffs of another.  Something was rising

from the fathoms.  I thought of rooms at the edge
            of a pasture, hornets

dismantling their rafters.  Of a dark wave rising
            from your body, its music

in my hands, no harbor.
            Of the wind, of the word

of your hours, its hand clasped over 
            its whisper, like a monk in a shattering

cloister.  Of the horrible Archer
            in the star-lanes, laying his bow

on my whisper.
            Of his strength.  Of the taste

of his armor.  He was No One.  He was never 
            our father.

He was going to shoot me out farther
            where I could visit you no more.




12     The Paris-American

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Joseph Fasano is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, due out from Cider Press in January, 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The
Southern Review, Boston Review
, and other publications. 
He won the 2008 RATTLEPoetry Prize for "Mahler in New York," and he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee.  He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions.  About Fugue for Other Hands, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has written, "...this book  embodies 'further, deeper, wilder'...it is never timid or tamed, has no easy comfort or uplift to offer but immerses us in the disturbances of living on this mortal earth from start to finish."


  
   Next week's poet:

 Christopher DeWeese
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